


where your love is lost (your ghost is found)

by xiomarisol



Category: The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:42:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23857792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xiomarisol/pseuds/xiomarisol
Summary: "She said writing might help, my shrink, that is. My mom got her for me, although she doesn’t call her a shrink, she calls her a counselor. Someone to help me get through something hard. I don’t know if my shrink actually knows what she’s talking about or if she’s bullshitting, but it’s a close call either way."-or, hazel grace reflects on her relationship with augustus in a journal.
Relationships: Hazel Grace Lancaster/Augustus Waters





	where your love is lost (your ghost is found)

**Entry # 1**

Is a story worth writing if no one is going to read it? I mean, I can scribble down everything I ever felt about Augustus Waters but it won’t make a difference if it never leaves this book. Maybe that will change, maybe not. Maybe I will realize that I am the only reader that this story needs. I guess some people would say that writing it down is enough, getting all that emotion onto paper and making it flesh, that that would be enough of an impact. Because then I could run the pad of my finger across the page and feel the denting of my thoughts.

She said writing might help, my shrink, that is. My mom got her for me, although she doesn’t call her a shrink, she calls her a counselor. Someone to help me get through something hard. I don’t know if my shrink actually knows what she’s talking about or if she’s bullshitting, but it’s a close call either way. I go every Thursday I can now, that is, when my lungs aren’t just generally sucking extra at doing their job. She told me that sometimes we keep our feelings so tightly locked inside ourselves because we feel like we can’t talk to anyone, like if we say them aloud, they might become true.

Now, I don’t know how much of that I _actually_ believe, but anything is worth a shot. Strangely, it doesn’t feel like I have all these feelings inside that I can’t get out, instead it feels like I’m trying to get things out that aren’t inside there. Like I’m empty, in a strange way. I never really believed in fairytales, because when you’re dealing with something like cancer you learn to always expect the worst. It’s easier that way, because if things don’t go your way you’re not as disappointed and in the rarities that they do, you appreciate it more.

But with Gus, I wanted to believe in fairytales. For once, I wanted to believe that I might get my happy ending. It feels stupid to even see it written down, because even as a kid I knew what a cruel place the world could be, and as soon as I met a boy I gave myself heart, body and soul to him without thinking of the consequences. But thing is, Augustus Waters was not just _any_ guy.

He was special, bigger in soul and optimism than anyone I have ever met. And I know that he wanted to be remembered for a lot of things, none of them for being a cancer kid, but in a strange way, I feel like I don’t want him to be remembered for anything else. I want to remember him for what he was, for all his color and the music that flowed out of his ears, but not for the sickness that coursed through his body as it started to shut down. I don’t want other people to remember him for his rhythm, I want to be the only one who remembers him that way.

It sounds terrible and greedy and selfish, but I want to keep him to myself. Augustus Waters touched a lot of people, but _nobody_ knew him like I did. At least, I don’t think they did. I know that he shared his colors to a lot of people, spreading inspiration over rooms like it was paint, but I want some of his colors to myself. He shared his reds and yellows and oranges, spreading them around and painting the world with his sunshine.

I just want to keep the blues and the blacks and the purples to myself, I want to keep the memories of the times that he wept for the sickness that coursed through his veins. I want to keep the colors of the times that he was not strong, the ones that he only shared with me. Is that too much to ask for? Because I feel like it is. Everyone keeps asking me to talk about it and for some reason they can’t understand that I don’t want to, not because I _can’t,_ not because I’m too hurt, but because I want to keep him to myself. I want the memories of the darkness that he secretly hid underneath all his light to myself.

My shrink can say whatever she wants, but I don’t feel any better doing this. Actually, I think that writing it down made everything feel a little more real, it feels like I’m picking at a wound, and if I keep doing it it is going to scar. I can feel the dents of the paper where my pen made contact with it, and I know that that can never be erased. It makes it feel more real, somehow. I don’t like the feeling of it.

-

**Entry # 2**

I thought I had dumped this stupid journal, but I came home from the hospital today and saw it sitting on my bedside table and before I could blink I’m bent over my desk with a pen in my hand. I don’t know why I want to write things down, because it isn’t like it’s going to make anything any better, but at this point there’s no point in wondering anymore. Because I have all these questions that I still have left to be answered and now I’m being told that the answers will never come.

Or rather, maybe the answers _will_ come, but I won’t be here to hear them. The doctors have lost hope in me getting cured, although they don’t say so. They said they had changed up my medication a bit, but I know what it means. It’s what they tell you when they don’t want to tell you that you are going to die, that all they’re doing is upping your meds so that you’re high as a kite when you do.

I feel like I should feel worse after getting news like this, but I guess I’ve been preparing myself all this time for those words. I’ve been sick for half my life with no sign of any light at the end of the tunnel, so even shocking news like this doesn’t feel as bad anymore. Is this what my life had come to? An endless waiting room, is this what I am now? Just another cancer kid who the doctors have lost all hope for? I don’t want to be that. Frankly, I’d rather be hit by a truck and die instantly than turn into another sob story, another name and face that you read about in the newspaper.

People everywhere dream for extraordinary lives. They dream to have lives of adventure and tragedy and romance, but the only thing I wish for is normality. Would it really be so bad to be terribly ordinary? I would be fine with having a job that I hate and two little kids that I love, I would be fine with living in an oblivious white-picket fence town with Augustus Waters. But instead, I am just me. Hazel Grace Lancaster, cancer kid. That’s probably going to be the first line of my obituary when I die. Is it sad that that is all that I have to look forward to?

I feel like it should be. Sadder, I mean. But it almost feels like I’m more upset about what could have been that wasn’t than I am about dying. Because I’ve always known I am going to die. Even when I didn’t know I was so sick yet, even back when my lungs were decent at doing their job, I have known that I am going to die. Sometimes I even narrate my voice-overs in my head in past tense, because that’s how much I feel that I am already dead. It’s the only thing I’m sure of nowadays, it’s the truest thing that anyone has ever told me. I am going to die.

Sometimes I wish that the doctors and the nurses and my mother would just stop coddling me, it’s not that I’m not flattered, or that I don’t want to be helped, but nothing they do is going to help me. Sheltering me from what is happening to me isn’t going to help. My mom acts like I don’t know what they’re doing. Like I haven’t seen any kid who ever passed through the literal heart of Jesus die the exact same way. It always starts off this way, and then they hang in there for a couple months until their name is added to the end of the list.

I have had an infinite life, I had an infinity of seconds with Augustus Waters, and I’m too tired to believe that I’ll get another one. I had my share of the world, and I’m going to have to let it all go soon enough. They say that you die twice, once when your heart stops beating and the second time when someone says your name for the last time. I don’t want Augustus to have to die twice, every time I wake up in the morning I say his name aloud, because I am a little bit scared that one day I’ll wake up and I’ll forget everything.

That’s actually the worst thing about it, feeling like you’re gonna forget everything. I feel like one day I am going to wake up and I won’t be able to hear his voice in my head any longer. Like I’ll forget the sound of his voice or the color of his eyes. I can still see him so clearly in my head, it’s like he is still there, and I can hold conversations with him and imagine his responses. I make my mom buy cigarettes for him, and I keep them under my pillow sometimes. I would buy a million cigarettes if it meant that he would be here again.

I have known my whole life that nothing lasts. I have prepared myself my entire life for the reality that everything ends. I have known my whole life that my life would end and everybody else’s lives would go on, but I never had to imagine having to go on without someone I loved so much. I always tried not to get too close to people, not because I thought that they could hurt me, but because I could end up hurting them when I died. But then Gus came in with his… Augustus-ness and ripped through my skin into my heart.

God, I’m crying now. I thought I had gotten over the crying stage. I guess not.

-

**Entry #3**

I’m used to the floating feeling now, they’ve got me hyped on so many different pills that I have no idea what I’m doing half the time. I can still see his eyes in my head so clearly, and the pills aren’t making it any easier. I can’t help but search for him in my dreams, and sometimes I believe that he’s actually with me. I don’t know why I’m writing it down. It makes it more real, I guess.

It’s hard for me to admit that I have actually led myself to believe that I’ve seen him a few times. I know he’s gone. It isn’t that I don’t—I’m not that crazy yet. But thinking of him makes it hurt so much more. It’s like—I don’t know, like the cut was already there but now that it has started to scab something is there reopening it and picking at it. It sounds crazy, but I almost want to believe that it’s actually him. Not him alive, obviously, but he believed in Somewhere.

I want to believe that he came back from wherever he was to be here. I just want to see Augustus Waters one more time, I would do anything at all to make him feel my love one more time. I want to believe that he is actually out there, somewhere. Because Augustus was not the kind of person who could be stopped, you know? It seems strange that anything would be able to stop him, even death. I don’t want to believe that he can just be gone… after everything, he shouldn’t be able to just be gone.

I want to believe that there is something to look forward to after the gates from this universe close behind me. I would gladly kiss the frozen lips of death if it meant having even one more moment with him. I just want my little infinity with Augustus Waters to last forever. I want it to last beyond this lifetime and survive unto the next.

It sounds so stupid, to believe that a relationship between two regular people could be a love for the ages, especially where there would probably be some pretty hot dead girls in Somewhere. But I am allowed to say stupid naïve things sometimes, because I should have the right to be stupid naive teenager every once in a while. Gus was my first love. He was my one and only love. Is. Still.

I still love him, I still wake up I the morning and for a second… for a second I forget. I forget that he is gone and then, _oh_ I remember. And it is like getting that awful news all over again. Living doesn’t really feel like living without him, living doesn’t feel like living when I’m high on nine different kinds of pills. It just feels like I’m living somebody else’s life. Like this isn’t actually happening to me, like I’m just stuck in somebody else’s body and one of these days I’m going to wake up and find that all of this was only a nightmare.

I’m floating on some invisible cloud of nine different kinds of painkillers and it just feels like everything is only a dream. Like there is no way to tell reality from my own imagination’s betrayal.

Sometimes I just want to forget. I don’t want to remember that Augustus is gone. It just hurts _so much_ to remember. Every morning, to feel like I’m being told the news of his passing all over again. And _god_ , it hurts even more than the first time, because this time I know it’s real and everyone has already heard and there is nothing I can do to forget anymore.

-

**Entry #4**

I had a dream about him last night. For some reason it felt worse than all the times I thought it was really him, because I could see myself having a conversation with him. He was there in all his glory and there was nobody there to tell me that he wasn’t real. I guess I knew, even in the dream, that he was dead, because that is something even my subconscious can’t seem to forget, but seeing him so…alive, so vibrant, so beautiful in all of his ways, I couldn’t help but cry when I woke up.

I don’t think the pain will ever go away. I don’t think that my awful striking ten will ever dull to a nine. My mom said that it would get better, so did my therapist, she told me that I am right where I’m supposed to be and that I had nothing to worry about. It doesn’t feel like it’s getting any better. I don’t think the Gus-shaped hole in my heart will ever shrink enough for it to stop hurting.

Because I loved him. Like the world could not decide whether to stop spinning on its axis or spin faster than ever when I was next to him. The world has always been full of destruction for me, but in that same world there was hope that one day I wouldn’t have to feel like a broken little girl with cancer anymore. And that was—is—very frightening because he was so real, so human, and he could have left me anytime. He could have hurt me at any moment and I would not be able to stop him.

I tried to save many of the pieces of Augustus Waters. I saved his voice, the sound of it vibrating through each syllable. The clarity, the confidence, the way that it quivered but not because he was scared but because he truly meant what he was saying. I saved his eyes, the way that he would squint slightly when he was saying something snarky. I missed the softness of his hands and the scars that covered his body. He had a lot of scars and I mapped them, I keep them in my memory, I still remember the texture of every one, the look of them and the stories behind him.

There was the small scar of a gash on his lower back from a bicycle accident when he was five, where his skin was slightly puckered. There was a small round scar from behind his ear from when Isaac accidentally stabbed him with a pen. There was the scars from the surgeries, large and pink, they danced around the length of his torso.

I have all these broken pieces of Augustus Waters that I don’t know what to do with. I want to love them but I don’t know how, I don’t know where to put them because they don’t fit anywhere. I can’t keep them from breaking the skin of my palms when I keep them in my hands but I can’t let them go because I love every piece of Gus’ broken glass.

I let myself fall in love with him and I guess this is me paying the price.

Have you ever wondered why they use the term ‘falling in love’? As if we are some kind of substance, like raindrops or teardrops, leaking from a cloud or from an eyelash. As if we are powerless beings and we cannot choose whether we fall in love or not. As if love is a downward motion and we are hovering above the ground waiting to be pushed. The thing about the word falling is that it does not provide a clear beginning or a clear end, like a flight with no departure or arrival, or a marathon with no gunshot at the start or tape at the finish line. Like we don’t know when we started falling and we don’t know if we are going to stop.

I fell in love with Augustus Waters, and I still don’t think I have stopped falling.

-

**Entry #5**

_Augustus_.

If it were any other word, it would have probably lost all its meaning considering the amount of times I’ve said it aloud. Yet, somehow, it didn’t and I still felt like I could say it a hundred times more and not get tired of it. I loved the way each syllable combined to form the perfect name. I am stuck in between two universes, one with him and one without him. I want to be okay with living in the latter but my heart and my mind are not on the same page. Too many parts of me are not ready to let him go yet,

I can still feel the burning on my skin where he touched me, light tingles where the ghosts of his fingertips would have been. I still wish for the pads of his fingers to lightly graze over my skin. I can still feel him there, and I know that he is out there. That alone makes me less scared for death, but I am still afraid of what comes after.

I know that Augustus believed in Somewhere. Someplace where he could live after death, because he did not believe that something could just stop being. There is no way that a soul could just disappear when the body that it resides in dies, rotting to a pulp. I have always had my doubts about God, and I know that it is quite possible that He is just a crutch used by people who do not have the backbone or the strength to pull themselves up, but someone like Augustus can make you believe in the impossible.

I don’t know what is going to happen to me, and I don’t care much if I die either. But I don’t know—I’m still a little scared of what comes after. Everyone is scared of becoming nothing, I guess, but the luckiest of us have learned how to ignore it. We can surround ourselves with all of the distractions that we want. I guess I’m scared of my infinity becoming nothing more than I am about becoming nothing myself. I had a beautiful wonderful amazing infinity of moments with Augustus Waters, which I am infinitely grateful for, but as soon as I leave, he and I will both become nothing, and the flames of our infinity will die out.

There will be nobody to remember what we had, there will be nothing left but our broken bodies buried six feet underground.

There will be an infinity of moments after Augustus Waters and there will be an infinity of moments after Hazel Grace Lancaster, but we had our very own slightly smaller infinity of moments together that soon enough, nobody will be left to remember. I guess that it is enough to know that I was the lucky girl to feel infinite with Augustus, and trust me, that makes me feel incredibly lucky.

It was like—I don’t know, imagine you’re laying on your back under the stars as they blink into existence. Now imagine, that not far from you, is a person that you had grown to care infinitely about. It doesn’t have to be recently, but I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the predicament where you had come to know someone in such a way that you felt nothing could change the way you felt about them. It isn’t like you completely understood that person, but instead that you understood that they had many sides to them—sides that probably very few people had ever witnessed. Like you trusted this person, and in return, they trusted you too.

Imagine looking down on yourself and very suddenly, you notice something that you had never noticed before; tied to your wrist, is a ribbon, most likely a deep silky red. It could stretch an infinite amount, and never break, it could pass through a million lifetimes in a million universes and it would always be connected to the person on the other end. Sure, sometimes you would feel your wrist be tugged if the person on the opposite end called for it, but still, it never broke. Even if you were to bring scissors to it, or snap it forcibly in two, it would remain to be—it would repair itself. On the other end is a person, and the ribbon is tied in a neat bow on their wrist, same as it is on yours.

That was how much I feel that I am infinitely tethered to Augustus Waters. Like not even death or a million universes could stop me from continuing to love him. He was the much bigger and greater half of our whole. He completed me—does, still. I know that I am alive (if you can even call this living) and he is not, but for some reason I feel like my love for him can pass through a million lifetimes and it cannot be contained. I do wish for him to be happy, if I could I would trade places with him, because I wish for him all the love in the world, but I know that most of all I wish for it to come from myself.

I fell in love with Augustus Waters, I dove head first an—


End file.
